Like I noted earlier, I believe many of the existing resources, while being perfectly fine for veterans may scare away newbies. www.perl.com is crowded with too many links, too much content, and too much oreillynetism. Since it is the first hit on Google, it should be a decent page where newbies can easily find their way in. Something like the Python Homepage or PHP’s. Plain, simple and effective. (note that I don’t have a problem with the O’Reilly Net format as a general rule, it’s just not suitable for newbies who may have never heard of O’Reilly or do not have the time to put up with it.) The Python.org site, for instance, contains just the right links for a newbies and nothing more. It has a rather cheesy site, but it is much more usable than www.perl.com. The latter has links to a host of other O’Reilly sites (what for), some articles that are way over Melissa’s head, no explanation of what Perl is all about, links to many O’Reilly books (again: why?), and is generally overcrowded with information. This is not a community site. It is practically a blunt promotion of everything O’Reilly!

www.perl.com as it is can be renamed as perl.oreilly.com or whatever. But otherwise, O’Reilly should not make a claim for the homesite of the Perl language and Perl community as they are not the only player in the game.

Also, I kindly ask the authors and publishers of the core Perl books to place them online. If a book teaches you advanced things that you can learn on your own, that do not absolutely require a book (like Damian Conway’s “Object Oriented Perl”), then putting it online would not be necessary, but still a nice gesture. However, it cannot be said on Programming Perl (the Camel Book), Learning Perl (the Llama Book), the Perl Cookbook, or Advanced Perl. I could not care less however, for Perl for Oracle DBAs, because it’s highly specialized and of no interest to Melissa or Robert. Rachel can easily learn it on her own should the need arise, and Joanna’s knowledge of Perl should not extend to this speciality.

There are other popular sites or resources, that may seem quite hostile to newbies. Perl Monks is one. use.perl.org should actually be quite good. Its standard Slashdot-like seemingly-underground look can actually appeal to newbies who wish to keep up to date with Perl news. What the editors should do is answer newbie submissions themselves should there be such, and only then tell them that it’s the wrong place to ask. Remember, people don’t read Submission Guidelines or whatever, and even I act mechanically on many web-sites. (don’t you?)

Generally, if one of the new resources would be better than the existing ones, then it would eventually supersede it. Yahoo and AltaVista were superseded to most extents by the much superior and more user and community friendly Google and Mozilla Directory, and we should not fear a healthy competition either. We should not concentrate our efforts, because we will also reduce the number of people doing them in the first place. And as Eric Raymond noted in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in a distributed Bazaar model, the output grows linearly to the number of people involved.

While the Perl’s source code was maintained in a very much Bazaar-like way, the Perl Community has been relatively Cathedral like looking for a selected small number of shrines. Let’s change that.